My Macros

Hi there,

Last weekend I got a health check and the blood test results were quite surprising and interesting. Everything was alright except triglyceride was too low. Well, triglyceride is “bad” fat that we should keep it low but I somehow kept it way too low. So I was suggested to eat more carb. I didn’t expect that.

This is the recent blood test results.

This is the old blood test results from last year. (Almost everything was normal. Globulin was too low but it was fine.)

In the past few years, I had been doing quite serious diet and workout. It started from when I would like to get a good shape because I was very skinny when I was young. So several years ago I decided to give it a shot by eating more and starting working out. I gained a lot of weights from fifty-something to seventy-something kilograms in a few months. I was pretty satisfied with the results. However, I didn’t gain only muscles but also fats. Since then, I became aware of what I ate and tried to adjust my diet by experimenting a lot of solutions (You can google them. There are tons of articles and clips everywhere.) combining with workout plans. These things take time. So my weights went up and down throughout a year and I still couldn’t find the best solution for myself.

At the moment, I was doing intermittent fasting with macro diet and workout (weight training and, recently added, cardio) meaning that I eat specific amount of carb, fats, and protein daily within my 8-hour-feeding window which is from 12.30 to 20.30 roughly. I didn’t start doing everything at once though. That would drive my nuts. At first I started with eating a lot with workout. Then I became more aware of the amount of food because my belly grew bigger. Then about 2 and a half years ago I started doing macros diet. Then about 10 months ago I started doing IF. Then about 2 weeks ago I started doing cardio. I was still unsure if I would keep doing them all for a long time. Stress could prevent good results. I just wanted to make sure that I could keep it all together.

Macros diet, for example, is very hard to start with and to keep on doing it. There is a lot of maths in the beginning. The first few weeks are the worst as you need to calculate the carb, fats, and proteins in your food and drink (scale is needed). It would get better once you get used to it.

Here is how to start. Firstly, you could use this website: https://tdeecalculator.net to get your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) meaning the calories you burn in a day including when you exercise. (There is also BMR (basal metabolic rate) meaning the calories your body needs to do basic activities in a day, but we can skip BMR here. TDEE already includes BMR in the calculation.) This website also suggests the amount of carbs, fats, and proteins you should eat in a day. Write them down somewhere. I would suggest a spreadsheet because you would need to do some calculation. Then, you could plan your meals in a day i.e. how many grams of carbs, fats, and proteins you should be eating each meal. Everything counts including snacks. Three meals or four meals a day doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, it’s just how many calories you take in per day. Though doing this shouldn’t disturb your normal life. Actually this would create your new lifestyle.

Next, you can find a workout plan from this website: http://www.nowloss.com/how-to-gain-muscle-mass-lose-fat-fast-at-same-time.htm and you might wonder why it tells you to eat less proteins than the previous website. I don’t know… Anyway, you can start from 3-day plan for the first 3 months. When you are confident enough, you can start adjusting your workout plan and schedule. It could be 4 days, 5 days, or more per week.

The most important thing is that you just have to start and stay disciplined and patient. At some point, you would wonder why different websites tell you different things. I had no answer because I also wondered the same. It’s all up to you to decide which one to follow. There was no such a perfect solution that fits everyone because our body and genes are different. You just need to find your own way. Give it a month or two to see the results. Then tweak your diet accordingly until you find the right one. (Though a good personal trainer might help, but I’d never tried one. It could be actually a shortcut to deal with all this mess XD)

Hope this blog would be helpful and useful somehow. Let me know if you have any questions :)

Cheers,
Best